From that day on, she was very quiet, never speaking unless spoken to, never volunteering a word or a giggle or even a snort when she was with others so that she wouldn’t draw attention to herself. It was toward the end of that visit that her cousin Marcus began calling her the Duchess.
Her cousin Antonia, only six years old, frowned up at Marcus and said, “Why, Marcus? She’s a little girl just like me and Fanny. We’re not anything but Wyndhams and ladies. Why is she a duchess when we aren’t?”
Marcus, the devil’s own son, looked down at her from his vast height, his expression very serious as he said to Antonia, “Because she doesn’t smile and she doesn’t laugh and she is aloof and more reserved than she should be for a child her age. Already she dispenses smiles and approving nods as if they were guineas and she only has three of them to last forever. Haven’t you noticed how the servants rush to do small services for her? How they melt if she but nods pleasantly to them? Also,” he added slowly, “someday she will be bloody beautiful.”
She said nothing, merely looked up at him and wanted to cry, but she didn’t. She merely pushed her chin up and looked beyond him.
“The Duchess,” he said, tossed her a laugh, and went riding with her two male cousins.
She bore her title of the Duchess well, for she had no choice. When she heard someone say she was perhaps too proud, another would say, not at all, she was merely becomingly reserved, allowing for no forwardness, her manners a joy to all those in her company.
When she was at Chase Park in June of 1808 at age thirteen, Marcus was also there. He was down from Oxford, visiting his cousins. When he saw her, he laughed, shook his head, and said, “Hello, Duchess. I hear it is your name now. Has anyone told you that it fits you perfectly?”
He was smiling at her, but she saw it only as a disinterested smile, a smile he gave because he had nothing better to do at the moment than speak to her.
She looked up at him coolly, her chin going up a trifle, and said nothing at all.
He raised a black eyebrow at her, waiting, but she held silent, hating his mocking look as well as his mocking, disinterested voice, until he said at last, “Ah, how very aloof you’ve become, Duchess, how very haughty. Is it because of my prediction when you were a little girl? Perhaps not. And to go with that, you are well on your way to becoming as beautiful as I knew you would. You are thirteen, I hear. Imagine when you are sixteen or so.” He paused, adding under his breath, “Jesus, I don’t believe I want to see you after you’ve grown up.” He laughed again, patted her shoulder, and strode out of the entrance hall to join Charlie and Mark.
She stood there with her two valises beside her, Mr. Sampson now coming toward her, smiling at her as he always did, Mrs. Emory at his he
els, Mrs. Emory smiling as well, calling out, “Welcome, Miss, welcome!”
And everyone now called her Duchess, even her father, Uncle James, even the Tweenie, who had first unintentionally informed her of her illegitimacy four years before. But everyone also knew she was a bastard. Why were they so nice to her? She would never understand it. She was James Wyndham’s bastard and there was no way around it.
Had anyone ever asked her, she would have said without hesitation that she had lost her innocence at the age of nine. When her Uncle James visited Rosebud Cottage she came to realize that he slept in her mother’s bedchamber. She became aware that they touched each other and laughed, their heads close together, like the devil and an angel, his dark head and her golden one so distinct but blending nonetheless, two such beautiful people, fascinating and gay. Once she even saw them kissing in the narrow corridor of the second floor, her mother’s back pressed against the wall, Uncle James hard against her, his fingers clutched in her glorious hair, his mouth heavy on hers.
Just three months before her yearly visit to Chase Park, it was Uncle James and not her mother who told her she was his daughter. She said nothing, merely looked at him. She was seated opposite him on a small pale blue brocade settee in the cozy drawing room of her mother’s home. He said without preamble, “You are my daughter and we will no longer pretend that you are not, at least not here. You are old enough to understand, aren’t you, Duchess? Yes, I see from your eyes and the set of your mouth that you already know. Well, no surprise there. I told your mother that you did, that you weren’t stupid or blind.” He shrugged, then said, “Unfortunately at Chase Park the pretense must continue. My wife wants the pretense and I have agreed to it.” He said other things too, things she no longer remembered, for she’d thought at the time that they were just words spoken to a child by a man who felt guilty. Did he care about her? She didn’t know. She doubted if she would ever know. She had her mother. She didn’t need him.
She merely nodded and said, “Yes, Uncle James. I am a bastard. I have known that for many years now. Please do not let it worry you, for I am well used to it now.”
He’d started at her calm words sounding so disinterested and flat, but he said nothing more. He was relieved. What more was there for him to say? He looked into his own very dark blue eyes, at his own ink-black hair, the shining braids thick and smooth on her small head. But her mother hadn’t been forgotten in the daughter. There were errant curls loose from the braids that curled around her small ears, and he loved to wind his fingers around the mother’s curls, so very soft and sweet-smelling. Ah, and she had Bess’s mouth, full and beautifully shaped, and her elegant nose, thin and straight. He shook his head and regarded his daughter sitting quietly across from him. He thought fancifully that she was so still, so utterly self-contained, like a statue. She was disconcerting, this daughter of his, not filled with laughter and mischief, not teasing and bounding about as the Twins always were.
It was hard to remember now that he’d not wanted her at first, that he’d ordered Bess to get rid of the brat. But Bess had told him plain out that she would birth the child and he could do what he pleased. What he’d pleased was to keep both of them, for he wanted Bess more than he’d ever wanted any other woman in his life. And now here was his daughter, staring back at him with his eyes, and she looked indeed serene and aloof as a duchess, this once unwanted child of his loins.
The Duchess remembered the two weeks of 1808 very clearly. Her cousin Marcus had made her withdraw even more with his mocking words that had, really, been born of mischief only, nothing more, but the pain of them had made her tremble. Then, on that second Wednesday, her only other two male cousins, Charlie and Mark, were both drowned in a boat race when two sailboats collided on the River Derwent with more than two hundred horrified people looking on from shore and at least a dozen other boys leaping into the river from their own sailboats to help. But no one had come to their rescue in time. When Charlie was struck in the head by the wildly slamming boom, he was killed instantly and hurled overboard. His younger brother, Mark, had tried to find him beneath the wreckage of the other sailboat along with several other boys. He’d drowned as well when the jib halyard had twisted about him, holding him under the water.
The boys were buried in the Wyndham family cemetery. Chase Park was in despair. The Duchess’s father locked himself in the library. The countess could be heard crying throughout the night. Marcus was white and drawn, speaking to no one, for he’d survived and his cousins hadn’t. He’d not even been on the sailboat with them. He’d been buying a hunter at the Rothermere stud. The Duchess went back to Winchelsea to her mother.
Over the next five years, the countess of Chase was pregnant every year in an attempt to produce another male heir for the earldom of Chase, but alas, none of the babes born to the countess survived their first year. All of them were boy children. The earl of Chase brooded, becoming more solitary as time passed, and bedded his wife endlessly, no pleasure in it for either of them, just grim duty, made more grim by the year, and he began to look upon his nephew Marcus differently, of his blood, certainly, but not his own son, not the blood of his own blood, and he wanted his line to go through his own flesh, not through his brother’s.
He came more often to Rosebud Cottage. He was quiet, his laughter becoming as rare as his daughter’s. It was as if he clung to her mother, and she kept him close, loving and gentle and undemanding.
But when the earl returned to Chase Park, as he ultimately had to, there was nothing he could do except watch his wife produce one child after another and watch each of them die.
Marcus Wyndham was the heir to Chase.
1
ROSEBUD COTTAGE, WINCHELSEA
JANUARY 1813
“I’M VERY SORRY to tell you this, Miss Cochrane, but there is more and it isn’t good.”
Mr. Jollis, her mother’s solicitor, didn’t sound sorry at all. He sounded unaccountably pleased, which was strange, surely, but she held silent, not only because of her grief over her mother’s death but because she was used to holding herself silent. It was a habit of many years. Over time, she’d learned a lot about people, simply listening and watching them as they spoke. She realized in that moment, in Mr. Jollis’s meaningful pause, that her father didn’t yet know of her mother’s death. She’d forgotten him in the suddenness of it, in the numbness it had instilled in her. Now, there was no one else to tell him. She had to write to him herself. She could see him reading her words, see his disbelief, his bowing pain when he finally realized it was true. She closed her eyes a moment against the pain she knew he would feel. He would feel endless pain, for he loved her mother more than he loved any other human being. But her mother, alive and laughing one moment, was dead the next. Her death was so needless, so stupid really: a wretched carriage accident, the shaft snapping for no apparent reason, sending the carriage hurtling off the winding road that ran too close above on the chalk South Downs cliffs, near Ditchling Beacon. Those cliffs rose eight hundred and thirteen feet into the air, then plunged to the deserted beach below. Her mother was killed instantly, but her body was washed out with the tide and never recovered. At least it hadn’t been recovered yet, and it had already been a day and a half. She looked up when Mr. Jollis cleared his throat, evidently prepared to finish his thought.
“As I said, Miss Cochrane,” Mr. Jollis continued, that smug tone coming more to the surface now, “I am very sorry about this but Rosebud Cottage is leased and the lessor is your, er, father, Lord Chase.”